Java palava

It's great to come back to Java years after being sigularly unimpressed by that ridiculous little Java man applet only to discover that Java is still a complete and utter dogs dinner when it comes to installation. I have installed JDK under Vista 3 times today and still no javac is found. Standard "helpful" types tell me to update my "path". Err, great. Why didnt the installer do that? Why can I not find my way around Windows? Why does it feel like its been desigend to thwart my every move. And more importantly why the hell can't I run the Blackberry JDE plugin for Eclipse under Linux to avoid all this heartache?

SE/JDK/SDK/ME/ etc etc etc

It's one of those "I could cry" moments.

Will ... not ... give ... up ..........

Eclipse under Windows in VirtualBox under Debian

Sometimes one has to admit defeat. I had hoped to set up a Blackberry Development Env in Emacs under Debian. But why bother? I just installed eclipse on Vista running in VirtualBox and it ... just works. Excellent Java parsing/highlighting/navigation. Excellent project facilities. Excellent help. Easy to install the CDT and the Blackberry IDE. Could this be the beginning of the end of my love affair with Emcas? It's just falling too far behind. I liked to think I didn't like the IDE expereince but lets face it, most of my time has been setting up emacs to work as an IDE. I want context help, completion, syntax hiliting, live debugging and rebuilding. But the facts are the facts : and that is simply that Eclipse kicks Emcas arse as a programming IDE (particularly Java) in a lot of areas. Sure its slow (so is emacs) and big (so is emacs) but its just more up to date and theres more happenong on a daily basis. The documentation is better. The only problem with eclipse is that its not emacs.... Emacs will continue to be my org manager and my email and news reader and my erc client. I hope ....

Still, I guess this could be a good chance for me to try emacs 23 under Windows for the first time.

Blackberry Java IDE

One of the "great" things about Java is that its cross platform. Or so one hopes. So imagine my surprise when I install the Blackberry Java IDE plugin with no warnings only to discover it requires win32 DLLs.

Hell's bells.

Blackberry

It seems that no matter what I try with my Blackberry Storm it doesn't work properly or there are glitches. The most recent issue is trying to use Instamapper. I finally got the gps tracker client installed and working (no mention of needing to turn ON the gps location setting in advanced settings), I got one update to an Instmapper map and then -- nothing. It tells me its transmitting but no updates on the embedded map here:

http://richardriley.net/bike/index#gps

My experiences to this day have not been good. Applications have too much cross over for a start - google maps, blackberry maps, vodafone go, gpd tracker, etc. What is using the gps? Do they conflict? I dont know. I just know that nothing works as smoothly as it should.

As for the keyboard in porttrait mode. If it switches back to suretype once more without me asking the damn thing's is getting f*cked into the Elbe.

RIM : where the hell are the wireless updates?!?!?!? I'm stuck on poxy .78 firmware and it's total and utter rubbish.